Why dads are crucial to the birthing process

byKristin SmithonAugust 23, 2016

You may have seen the “Love Your Spouse” challenge on Facebook recently. If you haven’t, it’s basically a series of posts — usually across seven days, but sometimes less — where women (mostly) but men (sometimes) post pictures of their relationship and explain why they love their spouse. It can be pretty cheesy in some cases, but oftentimes it’s very cute and interesting. You can usually learn a lot about some of your friends.

For people who have kids, usually there’s a picture within the seven days or one of the collages from the birth of a child. Almost always, this picture has both partners. In the title here, I said “dad,” but obviously it can be a boyfriend, same-sex partner, whatever. No discrimination here. Two people make a child and, ideally, two people raise that child.

You all might know about my other site too; it’s where I sell a product called The Birth Bag.

You can see everything in The Birth Bag here, but I wanted to do a quick post explaining the role of some of the items. Almost everything in The Birth Bag is catered to the female, i.e. the expectant mother, but some of the contents are focused on the male or the partner. I designed The Birth Bag that way because the role of the partner is crucial, no matter what the context is. In the upcoming elections, you’ll hear the term “… it takes a village…” probably hundreds of times (Hillary Clinton actually wrote a book by that title), and aside from child-rearing, there aren’t many situations where partnership is crucial than birth itself. It involves partnership between the physician and mother (or doula and mother), the mother and father/partner, the nurse and physician, the nurse and mother, and so on.

Each couple/partnership navigates to their own sweet spot based on who they are individually and together, so I can’t give much advice there. It’s uniquely personal. But I wanted people to understand why I have elements of The Birth Bag related to the male, or partner. You’re doing a lot too, and we realize that. I wanted to make sure it was embraced in how the product was created.

Does anyone out there have a good “dad-to-be” or “dad in the delivery room” story they want to share?